Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu. With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie's honeymoon he's enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain.
Dan Barber is a chef and a scholar -- relentlessly pursuing the stories and reasons behind the foods we grow and eat.
Dan Barber is the chef at New York's Blue Hill restaurant, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Westchester, where he practices a kind of close-to-the-land cooking married to agriculture and stewardship of the earth. As described on Chez Pim: "Stone Barns is only 45 minutes from Manhattan, but it might as well be a whole different universe. A model of self-sufficiency and environmental responsibility, Stone Barns is a working farm, ranch, and a three-Michelin-star-worthy restaurant." Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, it's a vision of a new kind of food chain.
Barber's philosophy of food focuses on pleasure and thoughtful conservation -- on knowing where the food on your plate comes from and the unseen forces that drive what we eat. He's written on US agricultural policies, asking for a new vision that does not throw the food chain out of balance by subsidizing certain crops at the expense of more appropriate ones.
In 2009, Barber received the James Beard award for America's Outstanding Chef, and was named one of the world's most influential people in Time's annual "Time 100" list.
There is so much to overlook if you believe you have the right to eat other creatures. There is so much to ignore if you only serve the wealthy what they are willing to pay for. One has to choose whether to have a conscience or not.
Sad isn't it?
Because he's interested in the highest quality food for his clients. If we mass produced high quality food, as he's saying, good food would be cheaper for everyone. If we used sustainable business practices instead of the ones that extoll the use of genetically modified foods. Then we would all be better off. Sigh.